Tracing the Origins of the Julian Assange–New York Times Feud

Yesterday, The New York Times published an excerpt from newspapers’s forthcoming e-book, Open Secrets: WikiLeaks, War and American Diplomacy: Complete and Updated Coverage from The New York Times. Written by executive editor Bill Keller, the excerpted essay discusses the details of, among other things, the Times’s generally unpleasant interactions with WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, who’s widely understood to be something of a cagey egomanic. “I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller—a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation,” Keller wrote.On Twitter, WikiLeaks responded to the Times piece thusly: “NYTimes does another self-serving smear.Facts wrong, top to bottom.Dark day for US journalism.” We hope that this does not mean the very bottom, as the piece concludes with the text of a Christmas card mailed by Assange’s lawyer: “Dear kids, Santa is Mum & Dad. Love, WikiLeaks.”

The Times’s relationship with WikiLeaks has been a topic of contention for both parties since the summer. In July, Assange called the paper “quite pusillanimous” for declining to link its articles about the Iraq War logs to the corresponding cables. At the time, Keller responded, “Who leaked this guy a thesaurus?” “Obviously our decision not to link to the WikiLeaks archive would not deter anyone who wanted to find it. All we could do was make this gesture to show we were not endorsing or encouraging the release of information that could cause harm.”